“Maybe it’s some kind of gift that life is giving us,” Sybil said thoughtfully. “We see history through their eyes and they see the distant future in us.”
“Are you frightened?” he asked her. What had just happened had shaken him, despite how enjoyable it was. And he’d really liked Bert, they saw eye to eye on many subjects they had discussed.
“I’m not afraid anymore,” she said quietly. “I was at first.” And then they laughed about Augusta and Angus, and talked about the children, and Gwyneth and Bert. A little while later, Blake and Sybil went upstairs, after she’d thrown out the burned roast beef and put away their unused plates. There was no way to explain it, or tell anyone else, but all of them agreed, when they said good night to their children, that it had been a magical evening, and they hoped it would happen again. Sybil was almost certain it would. This was only the beginning of a friendship between two families that had been determined by the fates, and would ultimately bless both. She could feel it deep in her soul.
Chapter 5
Sybil devoted the next morning, after Blake and the children left, to finishing Bettina’s book. The Butterfields’ history was all there. Josiah had died a hero’s death in the First World War. They had lost their entire fortune in the Crash of ’29, and Bertrand’s bank had closed, which bruised his spirit badly, along with everything else. Their daughter Lucy died that year as well, before her father’s death, which had added to his sense of devastating loss and grief. He had lost three of his four children by then, which shattered Gwyneth too.
Bert had fought valiantly to maintain their home, but their greatly reduced circumstances and Lucy’s death had been too much for him. He had died in his sleep of a heart attack a year later, in 1930, at the age of sixty, just as Michael had guessed. And Gwyneth had lost too much by then, and too many people she had loved. She had sunk into a deep depression, and Bettina had returned from Europe to comfort her and help her sell the house. They had sold many of their valuables, some art, and Gwyneth’s and her mother’s jewelry. Their whole life had changed. After the house sold, she had gone back to Europe with Bettina, and lived with her and Bettina’s second husband, Louis de Lambertin, who was a kind man, and Bettina’s daughter, Lili, who was twelve years old then. Gwyneth died two years later in 1932, during a hard winter, of pneumonia, like Lucy three years before. She had lost her will to live when Bert died and she sold the house. It was a sad end to their story, but she had no desire to live without him and never adjusted to her life in France, with no home of her own and only her daughter’s charity to support her.
Bettina and Louis had no children of their own, and he had adopted his stepdaughter, who grew up more French than American, and had no memory of the States, only of France. Lili’s late father’s family had no interest in her, nor contact with her, and had never desired any. Louis and his family had embraced Lili as their own. Bettina spoke French fluently, and spoke it with Lili.
The book said that Lili had been a nurse during the Second World War, and when it was over, she married a doctor she had worked with, Raphael Saint Martin. They had a son, Samuel, a year later in 1946. Lili would have been twenty-eight by then, Sybil calculated, as she read the details she had only skimmed before.
Bettina’s husband Louis died of causes she didn’t mention, in 1950, when she was fifty-four. He had been eighteen years older than she was, so it was a reasonable age to die at the time. He divided his considerable fortune between his widow and adopted daughter, and two months after his death, Bettina had returned to San Francisco and bought her parents’ home from the family that had purchased it from Gwyneth when Bert died twenty years before. In her book she said that she had been happy there until her final days, when she wrote the book, in 1980. She wrote that for thirty years, she had been content in the home where she’d grown up, and the obituary that had come with the material from the bank indicated that Bettina Butterfield de Lambertin had died peacefully in her sleep six months later, at eighty-four. There was a photograph of her with the obituary, and Sybil noticed that she looked like an older version of Gwyneth.
In the book, Bettina said that once she moved back in 1950, Lili had come to visit her in San Francisco every few years at first, but she had been busy with her husband, Raphael, and son, Samuel, who was only four when Bettina moved back to San Francisco. She said she had seen Samuel only a few times as a young child after she left France. She mentioned that Lili had health problems and later on could no longer make the journey to the States. At the end of her life, Bettina hadn’t seen Samuel since he was a child, nor Lili in several years. Sybil wondered if Lili had even been able to come for her mother’s funeral. The bank seemed to know that Lili had died ten years after her mother.
Sybil felt a wistful sorrow for all of them as she closed Bettina’s book. They had been so closely tied to each other, and so many things had happened to them over the years. Some of them were events that one couldn’t avoid in life, and others tragic accidents that must have marked them forever, like Magnus dying at six, and Josiah and Bettina’s first husband getting killed in the war. It reminded Sybil that the night she and her family had dinner with them had been January 1917 for the Butterfields, exactly a hundred years before the year the Gregorys were living in. In the Butterfields’ world, America had not yet entered the war, and Josiah was still alive.